Enoch Burke returned to jail.

 

Enoch Burke

Enoch Burke is the Irish school teacher who was dismissed from his job for gross misconduct because he refused to use the preferred pronoun 'they' in respect of a transgendered pupil. I understand that he did so on the grounds that it conflicted with his Christian religious beliefs and conscience. The school where he taught, Wilson's Hospital School, in County Westmeath, is a Church of Ireland, fee paying private school.

After his dismissal, Mr Burke, continued to turn up for work, and the school sought an injunction restraining Mr Burke from trespassing on school premises. Due to him defying the injunction, Enoch Burke has incurred fines of €225,000 and has served a number of prison sentences. A judge in the High Court in Dublin has now returned Mr Burke to prison, for what he called a "deliberate, sustained and concerted attack" on the authority of the civil courts and the rule of law. Mr Justice Cregan accused Mr Burke of pursuing a "fanatical campaign" for the last three years and said his decision was not about transgenderism. He said: "despite his time in prison, and despite these fines, Mr Burke persists in disobeying the court order."

The case of Enoch Burke is not a unique or isolated case but it's one of the most extreme cases. In Britain, there have been a number of cases where people have been dismissed from their jobs under similar circumstances, for refusing to act in a way that was contrary to their Christian beliefs and principles and conscience. But many of these people didn't choose to turn themselves into Christian martyrs, in the way that Mr Burke has chosen to do, by defying the law.

Freedom of conscience and the right to hold religious beliefs and principles, is protected under Article 9 the Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998, but it's not an absolute right. Many of the articles contained within the HRA are either 'limited' or 'qualified', meaning they can be restricted under specific, lawful circumstances, provided the restriction is necessary, legitimate, and proportionate, to achieve a specific aim such as protecting public safety or the rights of others.

Labour to make shotgun ownership Section 1. Will air weapons be next?

 

I think the issue of legal gun ownership in Britain is really about social class. When I used to shoot 12 bore shotguns, every shotgun owner that I knew, always said that the police do not like "people like us having guns." They meant the working-class having access to guns. There's a mind-set in Britain that seems to think that shooting and hunting should be the preserve of only landowners and the green welly brigade.

If you look at the history of gun laws in Britain, you will see that during the reign of Queen Victoria, gun laws in Britain were virtually non-existent, and gun deaths were virtually unheard of. When I was growing up, many of us had airguns and I knew neighbours, who had shotguns. People went rabbiting with lurcher’s and ferrets.

Two events seem to have led to the tightening up of gun laws in Britain. One of these events, was the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the second, was the demobilisation of British troops at the end of WWI. In recent years, there's been a crackdown when there has been a shooting incident such as Hungerford. A gun owner told me recently that in the 1960s, you could buy a shotgun license for 10 shillings at a British post office.

If shotguns become Section 1, instead of Section 2, it will become far more difficult for people to own a shotgun. This could affect clay pigeon shooters and shooting clubs as well as farmers.  In law, there's an assumption that people are entitled to own a shotgun, but not a rifle. I believe you can also appeal against a refusal to be issued with a shotgun certificate.

Labour are very much anti-gun urbanites. I expect that they will target airgun owners next along with crossbow owners and the owners of catapults. In Scotland you already need an Air Weapon Certificate, to own or purchase an air weapon.

On being sane in insane places.

 

Jack Nicholson - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', is possibly one of the greatest films of all time. There's really nothing mentally ill about Randle Patrick McMurphy but he contrives to get himself sent to a psychiatric hospital because he doesn't like doing prison work. He's a recusant who likes to take the piss and have a good time. He actually thinks everybody else in the hospital is a nutter but discovers that he's the only one that has been committed. Nurse Ratched is a complete control freak who takes a dislike to McMurphy because he won't conform or comply. After he attacks nurse Ratched, following a patient's attempted suicide, McMurphy is given a lobotomy and turned into a vegetable.

I remember some years ago reading about something called the 'Thud experiment', or what was correctly called, the Rosenhan experiment.  A group of psychologists and their students at Stanford University sought to test the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. The participants in the experiment, all psychology students or their mentors, submitted themselves to various psychiatric institutions across the west coast of America and feigned auditory hallucinations. David Rosenhan, who arranged the experiment, a Stamford University professor, and eight other people, five men and three women, entered 12 hospitals and submitted themselves for evaluation. All the participants claimed to be hearing a voice utter the words 'empty', 'hollow' or 'thud' and nothing else. Once accepted, they acted normally. Each was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and given antipsychotic medication. Some of the participants were actually admitted to the hospital for brief periods of time, ranging from 7 to 52 days. Although they presented with identical symptoms, five were diagnosed with schizophrenia and one with manic depressive psychosis. None of the pseudo-patients were identified as impostors by hospital staff, though some psychiatric patients, seemed to be able to correctly identify them as impostors. One nurse observed the note taking behaviour of one pseudo-patient, and consider it pathological.

The study was eventually published in the journal 'Science' in 1973, with the title, 'On Being Sane In Insane Places'. Many defended psychiatry against the experiment's conclusions, but the experiment is said to have accelerated the move towards reforming mental institutions and the release of many patients from mental institutions. 

The founder of Sinn Fein called for strikers during the Dublin Lockout to be bayonetted.

 

Arthur Griffith

During the eleven months of the Irish Civil War (1922-23), more Irish were killed than had been killed during the War of Independence during (1919-21). Approximately 2000 people were killed during the War of Independence and it's believed that some 4,000-5,000 people were killed, during the Irish Civil War.

Ireland never became the socialist republic of James Connolly, it became the Catholic, Conservative, Nationalist, country, of Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fail. Abortion and contraception were banned and young pregnant unmarried girls, were incarcerated in Magdalene laundries run by sadistic nuns. Many leading Irish nationalists, like Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith, were not socialists. They often believed that class struggle undermined Irish national unity.

During the Dublin Lockout of 1913, Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, had called for the strikers to be bayonetted. In 1905, Sinn Fein's membership was based on shopkeepers, employers and large farmers. It opposed strikes for higher wages because it believed that it would harm the interests of Irish business.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), opposed the Marxist-Leninist direction of the Official IRA and viewed communism as an 'alien ideology' and a dangerous distraction from the primary goal of establishing an independent united Ireland. An early PIRA slogan was "We serve neither Queen nor Commissar." Some PIRA members did develop revolutionary ideas while imprisoned but the organisation remained nationalist rather than communist.

Child Exploitation in Victorian Britain.

 

Victorian child exploitation

Many Victorian working-class kids were literally worked to death. Some of these children died of exhaustion. This is mentioned in E.P. Thompson's book 'The Making of the English Working Class'. He refers to the death of a young boy in Cragg Dale, in West Yorkshire. An Anglican minister, told a social reformer that he'd recently buried a boy who had died. The boy had been found asleep at work with his arms full of wood and had been beaten awake. He had worked 17 hours and was carried home by his father. He was unable to eat his supper and woke at 4.00 a.m. the next morning. He asked his brother's if they could see the lights in the mill as he was afraid of being late for work, and then died. His younger brother aged nine, had died previously. The father was described as "sober and industrious" and a Sunday school teacher.

The exploitation of children on this scale and intensity, was one of most shameful events in Britain's history. Thompson says that many English middle-class people of this period, were infected with class hatred for the labouring classes and suffered from "atrophy of conscience" and a "deformity of the sensibility." Lord Shaftesbury had said that the Anglican clergy as "a body...will do nothing on the children's behalf."

In Chapter 25, of 'Das Kapital', Karl Marx, quoted extensively from the work of Reverend Joseph Townsend called "A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a Well-wisher of Mankind.” (1786). Marx referred to Townsend as that "delicate priestly sycophant." Townsend had argued that poverty and hunger are necessary to force the working-class to labour for capitalists. He had written:

"It seems to be a law of nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident, that there may always be some to perform the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved of drudgery - but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions..."

Like Edmund Burke, Townsend believed that the laws of commerce were the laws of nature and therefore the laws of God. 

Of the 346 soldiers executed by the British army in WWI, only three were British army officers.

 

Shot At Dawn

There were 3,080 deaths sentences given to soldiers serving in the British army during WWI, of which, 346 were actually carried out. The overwhelming majority of soldiers executed (266 out of 346), were shot for desertion. Most of these soldiers were private soldiers. Only three British officers were executed during WWI. (Source: Tommy - Richard Holmes).

In his book called 'Memoirs of a British Infantry Officer', Siegfried Sassoon, says that many British army officers lost their nerve, but they weren't shot for cowardice. Many of these remained in the barracks or were given desk jobs back in Blighty. Sassoon said you couldn't do this with Tommy. The ordinary soldier was given a No. 9 pill and he stayed where he was until he was wounded or killed.

In October 1915, Second Lieutenant Edward Underhill, "wrote bitterly that his county men had no idea what the war was about." Many did think that they were fighting a war to keep Britain from being ruled by the Germans. Although the Germans did shell and bomb parts of Britain, an invasion of Britain, was not really part of Germany's war aims. A British infantry officer, remarked on, "how much more seriously the company would take the war were the (Ypres) Salient, around Preston, or Bolton, or Manchester.”

Richard Holmes writes that, "Two general truths define the British soldier's relationship with his enemy on the West Front: the first is that he generally had a high regard for the Germans and the second, is that the fighting man, rarely felt a high degree of personal hostility towards them."

It seems that the Saxon Germans disliked the Prussians, more than they did the British. The same can be said of men from Alsace who were fighting in the German army. If Robert Graves is to be believed, both the Germans and the British, disliked the French, because they ripped both sides off. 

The Britain of my father's generation, was a lot less complicated than it is today.

 

The Home Guard

My Dad died in 2015 and would've been 100 next September 2026. He was called up as the war was coming to an end and he spent his army service in Britain. He was told that they were going to be used to fight the Japs.

Britain today, is not the country that my father or the elderly gentleman, on Good Morning Britain, grew up in. Before he was conscripted, my father was in the Home Guard aged 17 and that would have been, in 1943. He told me that on one occasion he was asked to go and check on an ammunition dump in the town where he lived. My father and another young man, were issued with two .303 Lee Enfield rifles and both were given five rounds of live ammunition. Can you imagine doing that today with a 17-year-old youth, who doesn't know what discipline or respect is? I believe that today, suicide is now the biggest killer of men in Britain, aged under 50.

For most of his adult life, my father drove articulated lorries, and he was never required to sit a driving test in his life, nor was he ever unemployed. He said that when he started driving there was no requirement to sit a test. He said you bought a car and if you could prove you hadn't a knock within six months, they gave you a driving license.

The Britain of my father's day, was a lot less complicated than it is today. Despite his age, I never heard my father ever grumble about the way in which he thought Britain had changed. He just got on with living and tried to adapt accordingly. He used to say to me that there was good and bad in every kind and just treat people as you find them. 

Those young lads who fought in WWII, were fighting the Nazis and Hitler. It's thanks to them that we never finished up with a Nazi jackboot stomping on our faces and a Europe dominated by Fascist dictators.

Multiculturalism.

 

"Multiculturalism" can mean a number of different things, but at its simplest, I suppose it can be defined as allowing many different cultures to co-exist within one nation and respecting one another's culture.

You often hear the term "BAME Communities", which is rather meaningless, because there isn't really such a thing. It's a lot of wishful thinking. These different ethnic groups don't really mix with one another and have little in common with one another and can often, be hostile to one another.

The old gentleman who fought in WWII, who appeared on TV, didn't say why he felt the way he did, so we can only speculate. The Britain that he grew up in, is very much different today. I'm 71, and as a child, I rarely saw a black face. Many people who came to Britain in the 1950s, from the Caribbean, saw Britain as their "mother country." As they were part of the British Empire, they had been educated in much the same way as English people. They were invited to come to England and met with a lot of racial abuse.

In retrospect, I believe that many people think that fighting Hitler and the Nazis was a war worth fighting. It's thanks to people like this old gentleman, that we never came under the heel of the Nazi jackboot and fascism. The plight of European Jews was not a casus belli for WWII, because most people didn't know about the concentration camps until the camps were liberated.

If economics is a science, why did so many economists fail to foresee the 2008 financial crises?

 

The economist J.M. Keynes made a lot of money from his investments, but being an economist, won't necessarily make you a rich man, or even a successful businessman. There's something called the "Fallacy of Composition", that suggests that although some people can succeed with a particular business, it doesn't mean that everyone can succeed with it.

 The American economist, J.K. Galbraith, said that "economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists." For decades, economists played an important role in creating the conditions for the 2008 financial crisis and dozens of smaller crises that came before it, arising mainly from financial deregulation. The 1982, Third World debt crises and the banking crises in Chile; the 1995 Mexican pesos crises; the 1998 Russian crises and the banking crises in Sweden, Finland and Norway, following financial deregulations in the late 1980s. Most economists didn't predict or foresee the 2008 financial crises that was completely man-made. It didn't arise from any war or economic depression but it nearly collapsed the whole capitalist financial system. It was the equivalent of financial markets getting mad cow disease.

The ‘Sage of Omaha’, Warren Buffet, called 'derivatives", the financial weapons of mass destruction, whereas, Alan Greenspan, of the U.S. Fed, thought they made markets more efficient. The complexity of these new financial products - Asset Backed Securities; Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps, is exactly what made them dangerous.

In 2013, the Nobel Prize in Economics, was shared by two American economists who held completely opposing views about the causes of the 2008 financial crises. Eugene Fama, who believes in the "efficient markets hypotheses" argued that financial markets were a casualty of the recession and did not cause it. He argued that the U.S. government made lending and credit too easy to obtain and that banks acted rationally, in responding to the incentives put in place by an interfering government. In contrast, Robert Shiller, the other prize winner, stressed how investors can be swayed by psychology and irrational exuberance, which affects the workings of the market.

In a TV interview in 1995, Buffet said: "I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I have earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later. I work in a market system that happens to mean that everyone can succeed within it."

Unfortunately, not everyone does succeed in the capitalist market system and there's a lot of evidence that markets are routinely rigged in favour of the rich and that there's mis-selling of financial products and lies told to regulators. Markets may also fail to produce socially optimal outcomes.

Lee (30 pence) Anderson, accuses the CAB of "gaming the system" to help people get disability benefits.

 

Lee Anderson

Lee Anderson MP, a former Labour councillor and Nottinghamshire miner, and former member of the Carlton Club, has just accused the Citizens Advice Bureau, who he used to work for, of "gaming the system" by helping people to get on disability benefits like PIP.

What a louse! If there's one thing I can't abide, it's a Tory in clogs and a Judas, who stabs his own class in the back. It wasn't long ago Anderson was denouncing food banks as unnecessary and claimed you could knock up a meal for 30 pence. If a wealthy man seeks professional advice to avoid paying tax, his he gaming the system, Lee? If a British MP fiddles his expenses, is he trying to game the sytem?

Each year hundreds of millions of pounds of benefit payments go unclaimed by working-class people because they find it far too difficult and complicated to fill in the forms and so, they seek advice and help from bodies like the CAB, to do so.

The Nottinghamshire coal fields, have a history of producing scab and blackleg miners like Roy Lynk and George Spencer, who have supported the Tories and the bosses during miners strikes.